There’s a particular kind of corporate behavior where a company spends three years telling you how much it cares about something, builds a dedicated page on its website to prove it, hires people to measure it — and then, quietly, stops. No press release. No “we’ve decided to sunset this disclosure.” The data just isn’t in this year’s report. If you weren’t keeping score, you’d never notice.
We keep score.
Our Transparency Score measures, on a 0–100 scale, how much of the human capital data we’d expect a company to disclose actually shows up in its public reporting — board demographics, workforce representation, development and mobility, and pay equity, weighted by how material each is. For many investors, these disclosures are the only standardized way to compare workforce practices across companies. When they disappear, so does the ability to benchmark them. And the story this year is not subtle.
Across every index we track, 2026 is the steepest single-year drop we’ve recorded.
The S&P 100 — the largest, most scrutinized, best-resourced companies in America — fell from a 2024 peak of 53.5 to 32.2. That’s not a dip back toward the mean. It’s below where these companies started in 2022, erasing four years of accumulated disclosure in a single reporting cycle. The pattern repeats with remarkable consistency down the size spectrum: the S&P 500 dropped from 45.9 to 31.5, the Russell 1000 from 40.1 to 27.1, and the Russell 3000 — the broadest cut — from 24.6 to a sparse 14.6. Bigger companies still disclose more than smaller ones. They’re just now disclosing less of it.
What’s worth dwelling on is the timing, because the retreat came in two distinct waves. Board demographic disclosure — which we covered in depth during proxy season — was the first thing to go. It started falling in 2025, roughly a year before everything else, and it fell the hardest: across every index, board reporting now sits at just 40–52% of its 2024 peak, while representation, development, and pay equity each retained roughly 62–86%. In the S&P 100 alone, board disclosure more than halved, falling from 15.2 points to 6.4.
Then came the second wave. Representation, development, and pay equity largely held steady through 2025 before dropping sharply in 2026. For representation — the single largest component of the score — more than three-quarters of its entire peak-to-trough decline occurred in that final year. Pay equity, never a generous disclosure to begin with, has nearly evaporated; in the broader indices it’s now little more than a rounding error.
If board disclosure was the canary, 2026 is the year the rest of the coal mine emptied out. The pattern is consistent enough across every index that it’s difficult to dismiss as coincidence. Whatever drove companies to retreat from board demographic disclosure in 2025 appears to have been followed by a broader retreat across the rest of the human capital disclosure stack a year later.
The composite score tells one story. The underlying disclosures tell an even starker one.
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Strip away the weighting and just ask a blunt question: of the companies we’d expect to report a given metric, how many actually do?
The answer depends on how granular the metric is. The headline categories held up — a majority of the S&P 500 still discloses overall workforce gender (83%) and race/ethnicity (76%). But the detail is where the retreat shows. Break representation down by seniority and it thins fast: gender at the C-suite sits at 21%, and even leadership-level race/ethnicity disclosure has now slipped below half. The self-ID categories are thinner still — age (35%), veteran status (13%), disability (8%), and LGBTQ+ (3%). Employee development reporting has retreated to levels not seen in years, with promotion demographics in the single digits, and pay equity disclosures — which never became standard practice to begin with — have nearly disappeared.
Those figures make clear that this wasn’t a matter of companies trimming around the edges. Entire categories of disclosure disappeared in a single reporting cycle.
Here’s the part that should make a few investor-relations teams wince. The companies posting the largest declines are not laggards finally giving up. They are, disproportionately, the names that were out front a few years ago — the ones with the polished sustainability reports and the quotable CEO commitments.
General Motors went from a 70.7 to a flat zero — a perfect score in the wrong direction. Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and American Express all cut their disclosure roughly in half or worse. In many cases, the decline wasn’t driven by a single metric disappearing but by companies removing multiple disclosures at once — board demographics, workforce composition, pay equity, or development metrics that had appeared consistently for years.
Financials account for eight of the twenty largest declines, which is a lot of “we take our people seriously” letters to reconcile with the data. The retreat wasn’t confined to one industry or one disclosure framework. We observed meaningful declines across every major sector and every index we track.
By contrast, the companies still at the top of the table skew toward Utilities, Real Estate, Health Care, and Consumer Staples — American Water Works (74.4), Altria (73.8), CVS Health (73.4), and Target (73.2). Less politically exposed, more heavily regulated, or simply operating in industries where these disclosures remain expected, they’re now the transparency leaders largely by continuing to report what they already were.
The charitable read is that some of this reflects reporting fatigue or a strategic pause. The less charitable — and, given the breadth of the retreat, perhaps more plausible — interpretation is that human capital transparency was always more contingent than it appeared. Once the pressure eased, many companies simply stopped publishing information they had previously argued was essential.
Not long ago, the debate centered on how much additional human capital information companies should disclose. Today the more relevant question is which disclosures will survive at all.
For investors who built stewardship, benchmarking, and diligence processes on the assumption that this information would continue to expand, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the disclosure baseline you relied on in 2024 no longer exists. Going forward, it won’t be enough to evaluate what companies choose to disclose. You’ll also need to account for what they used to disclose — and no longer do.
What we’re reading:
- Work From Home Is Here to Stay—Even if Some CEOs Don’t Love It Work from home is hardly over. In fact, it’s probably here to stay. The past couple of years have seen a drumbeat of big companies announcing, to great fanfare, that they were requiring employees to spend more time in the office. Home Depot, Target, Microsoft, 3M, Intel—the list goes on and on. But across the broader economy, the evidence suggests that the return to the office has stalled out. (Wall Street Journal) and The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego. (New York Times)
- Why Companies Are Cutting Middle Managers in the AI Era A big company without middle management might sound far-fetched, but it’s the sort of enterprise a growing number of chief executive officers seem to favor, in tech, finance and beyond. (Bloomberg)
- Zuckerberg says Meta made ‘mistakes’ in AI workforce shift Mark Zuckerberg has told employees that the social media giant has made mistakes in its AI transformation of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. Zuckerberg is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he seeks to reshape his company’s inner workings around the technology, reflecting a broader pattern among major U.S. companies this year, particularly in the tech sector. (Reuters)
- What if the office is actually a workplace perk? The leaders getting in-office work right aren’t just reopening offices—they’re rethinking what those offices are for and how to frame policies for employees. Here’s how. (Fast Company)
- Trump Labor Department sued over access to workplace diversity data A shareholder group is fighting the Trump administration over its refusal to release federal government data that tracks diversity in the American workplace. USA TODAY exclusively obtained a lawsuit filed by As You Sow in Washington, DC, federal court claiming the Department of Labor has stonewalled the nonprofit shareholder advocacy group’s request for workplace diversity data for more than two years. (USA Today)
- The Job Interview Is Broken. Here’s How AI Could Actually Fix It. The idea among many hiring managers and technology experts is that if you take humans out of the equation—and replace the early, flawed generations of technology assistance with more-advanced artificial-intelligence systems—you’ll get a vastly better sense of who’s the best person for the role. That’s the hope, anyway. (Wall Street Journal) and AI Has Broken Hiring. Here’s How to Fix It. For decades, corporate hiring has favored candidates who could present a flawless résumé and deliver highly structured answers to interview questions. Today, generative AI is making it easier for applicants to do those things, whether they have the underlying competence or not. Put another way, the ability to perform well in interviews is becoming infinitely scalable and practically free. For anyone involved in recruiting, that’s a problem. (Harvard Business Review)
- Tech Workers Who Don’t Embrace AI Face Triple the Layoff Risk, Gallup Finds For tech workers, artificial intelligence may be delivering a benefit that goes beyond efficiency: a lower risk of being laid off. New research from Gallup finds that tech workers who aren’t regular AI users are three times more likely to lose their jobs than their peers. (Bloomberg)